Thoughts on The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?

The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?

Written and Directed by John Schnepp

I've been waiting on this one for a good long time.
Launched as a Kickstarter on January 24th 2013, John Schnepp's documentary examines the genesis, pre-production and eventual implosion of Warner Bros.' aborted Superman Lives project. Through interviews with most of the major players, the film outlines how the project fell apart so dramatically just weeks before shooting was due to begin.

The screening took place on May 15th in a large conference room on the first floor of the Excel Centre in London, as part of the MCM London ComicCon. The film ran off a laptop to a digital projector, so although it wasn't exactly a cinema screen, it was definitely bigger than your average TV. There was a brief Q&A afterwards with Schnepp and producer Holly Payne.

The film
The idea for the film originated when Schnepp started seeing leaked concept art on the internet in 2001. It intrigued him because it looked completely different from the previous cinematic interpretations. He collected about 3% of the art that's shown in the movie, and they had to cut 30% of what they had to keep the running time down.
By chance, Schnepp met Steve Johnson in 2012; but when he asked him about Superman he didn't want to talk about it...
The film took two and a half years to make, and the sound mix still wasn't quite finished for this screening. At a point in the middle the sound and picture noticeably fell out of sync for about 20 seconds.

What I learned from the film:

Jon Peters

• Peters claims he secured the movie rights from the Salkinds back in the early '90s, post Jones/Bates draft. He took some delight in telling Warner Bros. they didn't have the rights they thought they had, and from that point they worked together. It's all a bit vague, and suggests that either there may have been some separated rights issues or that Peters is being economical with the truth. Regardless, at some point WB managed to lever him off, because despite being credited as Producer on Superman Returns (2006), by 2013's Man of Steel he was merely Executive Producer, which is significantly more vague. He was also allegedly forbidden on the set of Zack Snyder's movie. If he solely owned the rights to the character on film, would they have been able to sideline him that efficiently?
• Peters seems to imply HE came up with the Thanagarian Snare Beast, though it's hard to believe he would know Hawkman lore and not know who Kal-El is, as Smith claims.
• He also denies enforcing the "no flights, no tights" diktat.
• He thought Smith's script(s) were "amateurish".
• He wanted Superman's cape to be its own character (?!)
• He has the skull-ship model which mysteriously disappeared from the production office days before the project went belly-up.
• Peters wanted to make a film where the characters could "taste the blood in their mouths"!
• Peters claims to have been in around 500 street fights, and would routinely show up at the art department to (literally) wrestle the staff.

The story

• It's implied that the Batman cameo was Smith's idea, but The Dark Knight appears in the very first of Poirier's drafts.
• Lots of the participants knew their own parts of the story inside out, but not the whole. Smith has admitted in Fatman on Batman he was astonished at how little he knew, despite being on the inside.
• The recreations of key scenes aren't the strongest part; they were produced for a just a couple of thousand dollars, and the film wouldn't feel weaker without them. Interestingly, one of them is the restaurant scene where Clark taps his foot nervously, smashing every glass in the place. As presented, he's nervous because he's about to propose to Lois… but that was never the case in any of the scripts I read. He was nervous because he'd decided to reveal his secret identity to her. He does produce a diamond but he does so by squeezing a lump of coal to prove he's who he says he is.

Production design

• A lot of concept art was produced; the artists were encouraged to come up with as many crazy ideas as they could. Sylvain Despretz and Michael Jackson (not that one) feature heavily, as does Steve Johnson (whose team designed and built the fibre-optic light suit, amongst other things). Jackson had originally signed to create concepts for The Matrix just a few days before he got the call, but quit to join Superman.
• Burton drew the initial "many faces" version of Doomsday.
• In some concept art K was conceived as a hi-tech clockwork teddy bear (which wasn't in the scripts I've seen).
• At another point K was depicted as a strigine (or owl-like) machine (again, this isn't in any of the scripts I've seen).

Casting

• Before Burton came on, Peters Entertainment drew up a shortlist of actors to portray Brainiac. Christopher Walken was on the list, but top of it? Howard Stern.
• Sandra Bullock was top casting choice for Lois, but Courtney Cox was also on the list. Burton denies all knowledge of this, saying he must have been out of the office the day that was circulated.

Costume design

• The film features some costume test footage, including Cage's take on Clark Kent in a suit jacket and Mickey Mouse t-shirt. 
• Some of the Superman costumes looked great, some not so much. The costume with the low-cut neck and newly-stylised S actually looks a lot better in motion than the the infamous, bleary-eyed Cage photo indicates.
• There was also a costume with raised, armour-like shoulders which didn't look so great.
• A series of polaroids of a more toned-down costume (like the panther suit equivalent of the classic red and blue) actually looked really promising.
• Everyone is at pains to point out that the fibre-optic suit was designed specifically for the regeneration scenes; Cage wouldn't have been flying around in it the whole movie. Anyone who'd read the scripts would assume that was the case, but, you know... the internet.
• The flying effects test looked fine.

The long, slow death

• As confirmed elsewhere, the budget was slashed significantly towards the end of pre-production. This is evidenced in Gilroy's second draft, where there's no Fortress, and the Doomsday battle is confined to one floor of LexCorp.
• Batman and Robin hadn't been Warners' only recent bomb; the previous year had seen a series of poor performers, which suddenly made WB very cautious about mega-budget event pictures.
• When they finally pulled the plug, the money ended up going to Wild Wild West, on which Peters was also a Producer. And which ended up featuring a huge mechanical spider.
• Peters claims he threatened to throw Terry Semel out a window if he didn't change his mind.
• Burton refused to take Peters' calls after the project was shut down.

What I learned from the Q&A:

• Peters is edging back into front line producing and had to be persuaded by his attorney to appear, concerned that he would be portrayed in a negative light. Though he's a self-confessed hermit who wants to be "unreachable", the film-makers found him "charming, entertaining, disarming". Schnepp confessed to Peters' attorney that he's not exactly the hero of the movie, but that the goal was to present him as they found him, rather than simply looking to confirm the stories. Schnepp contends that without Peters' side of the story, the film isn't balanced or democratic.
• Wes Strick was the first major player to agree to be interviewed. Dan Gilroy was one of the last.
• It took around eighteen months to secure Kevin Smith's participation.
• It took the same amount of time (eighteen months) to get Burton on board; Schnepp basically stalked him through his contacts and approached him through his rep. Burton didn't know if he wanted to talk about it and Schnepp had to wait eight months. After that came an email asking him to wait six more. By that point the production was out of money, and Schnepp sold half his comic book collection to keep it going. Once Burton agreed to be interviewed, many others followed (mostly from the art and technical departments like Coleen Atwood, Jackson, Despretz and Johnson). 
• Although in contact with Cage's manager for over a year, the actor ultimately declined to be interviewed, but has heard good things about the film. They hope to be able to talk to him at some point but he won't be cut in; anything he contributes would be a supplement. Cage's presence is still very much part of the film because of the extensive use of test footage and old interviews.
• Asked which of the scripts he prefers, Schnepp replied that certain parts of all of them are great, and other parts are not. He referred back to the constant hiring/firing process, meaning there's no cohesive vision from a single writer.
• Schnepp has previously alluded to seeing a second Strick draft but I wasn't able to ask him about that, nor whether he'd come across the rumoured drafts by Ron Bass and Akiva Goldsman alleged to have come between Strick's and Gilroy's.

Conclusion
TDOSLWH is the most comprehensive look at this dead project we could have hoped for, and is well worth your time if you're interested in Superman and/or how franchise blockbusters are made (or not, in this case). Despite focusing primarily on visual aspects such as production design, story isn't neglected, with all three (confirmed) screenwriters of the Burton era participating.
The only reason I'm not more superlative is because I've already learned so much from researching these scripts, much of what the film showed me wasn't a surprise. There are plenty of interesting nuggets, but they'll perhaps be better appreciated by those who know nothing about the project going in.

Nontheless, it's a well-crafted, patient film made by dedicated people who are clearly in love with the very idea of Burton's Superman. If there's one weakness, it might be that very enthusiasm. Schnepp risks getting carried away with the imagined beauty of the finished film, and might have been more analytical about the crazier elements of the script and story which ultimately undermined the entire project. This tends to gloss over the fact that even Gilroy's second draft (probably the best of them to this point) was built on the fundamentally flawed foundations of previous ones.

Over-flowing with information, I've found there are things I simply haven't been able to recall, and it'll be interesting to revisit the film to see if I feel differently (not to mention dive into the extensive bonus features) when The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? goes on sale July 9th. Pre-orders are available now.

On Black List 3.0 evaluations

I've been at screenwriting a long time, but always feared stepping into the arena, exposing myself to criticism, afraid I have no talent for writing despite some rewarding but all-too scarce evidence to the contrary.

But fortune increasingly favours the bold (which is ironic given that so many writers are anything but).  As I've got older, I've come to realise that this is what I care about beyond all the imagined trappings.  This is my geekery, in the same way others' is crochet, libraries, IT. This is what I do. This is who I am. 

And I couldn't hold off anymore.  The fear of not knowing begins to outweigh the fear of being shot down. I need to know if I have what Americans call "game".  If the dream is a pipe one or if maybe, just maybe, I have a chance to do what I love and make some kind of living from it. 

"All I offer is the truth. Nothing more."

The Black List 3.0 doesn't claim to make writers; it simply offers them exposure.  That's all well and good, but saying we go in with no hopes or expectations would be disingenuous.  There are three distinct layers of hope:

• An industry pro likes your work.  They won't rep you, but tell you to keep at it.  This would have been enough for me.  I wouldn't have booked my plane ticket, but it's progress. Minimal validation, to be sure, but as all writers know, we'll take what we can get.

• Someone likes your work and offers to rep you.  It's still not plane ticket time, but it's a step up. A toe-hold on the battlements.

• Someone likes your work, wants to rep you and thinks they can sell the script. I'd argue it's Sky-Scanner time, even if only from idle curiosity about how much a flight to LA actually costs.

Everything beyond that is the preserve of Variety, THR and our own fever-dreams.  I'd be lying if I said I hadn't though about it, and so would you. 

But there are safeguards; the reader.  Like Agents of The Matrix, they are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys.  They are the system.  If your script is downloadable it will still be available to the right people, but these are busy folk; they live on recommendations.  If readers don't like the work and rate it accordingly, your chances plummet.

Last week I uploaded my screenplay for feedback on the Black List 3.0.  This morning, I got that feedback.

The results were not what I expected, or hoped for.  Now I have to deal with that.

I think ten years ago I would have thrown a hissy-fit. There would have been anger.  Bitterness.  A resort to the kind of tactical self-denial seen on screenwriting message boards across the world. It's better than X, and that got made. It's a conspiracy. It's not what you know, it's who.

I have no anger. Only determination.

The reader did his/her job.  There's no malice in their words.  I'm upset, I'm gutted and I've only just stopped shaking, but the classic screenwriter's retort that "they don't understand my work" is self-serving and of no practical use.  Our job is to make them understand our work.  If we can't do that, we've fallen at the first hurdle.

I lie beneath that hurdle with bloody knees and hurdle-grade plastic wedged into my balls.

There are positives to be taken.  The words "throwback" and "fun" were used.  The feedback also makes some decent points that I can address in the rewrite, not the least of which is that this reads like an R-rated movie, and would likely make less money as a result.  That's not going to encourage any studio to say yes. We tend to forget this when writing for ourselves, but it's important to understand the realities of the marketplace, the milieu into which scripts are being plunged.  The fact is that right now, studios want PG-13 content, and despite a multitude of 2+ hour blockbusters, 117 pages is now considered a hair too long.

The evaluation also raises some points I believe are misguided.  I won't go into them because no matter how eloquent one thinks one is, a point by point rebuttal of that nature can only ever come across as bitter and angry.

Perhaps it all comes down to sensibility.  I believe I know what I've written and why I've written it.  The reader fundamentally disagrees. I think the rating is harsh in the context of the fairly mild criticism levelled at it.  (There was nothing like "you can't write, please stop giving us your money", but perhaps they're just humouring me.)  Like any artist, I'll defend some of my choices to the hilt, but the fact remains; we have to make them understand, and bawling isn't the way to do it.

Above all this illustrates how switched on we have to be to break in.  I brought what I thought was my A game, and it wasn't enough.

What we as amateurs have to be careful of is swinging with the wind, simply changing everything somebody doesn't like; if reader A loves your characters and reader B hates them, which way do you swing?

You swing your way.

When you've reached a point where multiple readers address the same concerns, when the general consensus is that you are wrong, or where the studio has notes (this can be the same thing as scenarios one and two)... fine.  It may never be easy but it's common sense.  Compromise is inevitable in even the least collaborative of artistic media, and film is probably the most.

But before all of that, you have to write for you.  From you.  Or you are lost.

Be guided, be mindful of and serious about others' opinions, but first and foremost, write for you.  Just know that in one of creativity's most cruelly sadistic paradoxes, doing so may mean that you labour without reward, without recognition.  If you can reach even grudging acceptance of that, you're going to be a whole lot better off.

So where do I go from here?

I re-read the coverage and it's like looking at the last letter from an ex.  The one that finally confirms what you always feared; this is definitively over.  Your heart races every time you look, even though you know what it says so well you could read it in your sleep.  Still, you hope the words have changed. 

They haven't.

But this is not over. From here I go backwards.  And forwards.  Already rewriting. To truly know if these problems are not the result of a sensibility mismatch, I'm going to have to pay for another evaluation.  It's the only way to be... sure?  Maybe not.  But more sure.

This has been a "no".  But it only takes one "yes".